The Telegraph understands that International Medical Corps has
suspended one of its most senior officials working on the cross-border
aid operation. GOAL has also replaced a locally staffed logistics team
in Turkey and is currently barred from using its €6.2m [Euros] [$6.6 million US dollars] of US grant money
to procure food and non-food items.".......................

But the aid agency said it could not disclose whether the organization was under investigation as reported in some media.

USAID's
Office of Inspector General said last week that it had unearthed
corrupt practices involving a number of programs operating out of Turkey
which provide humanitarian aid to Syria.

"The
investigation to date has identified a network of commercial vendors,
NGO employees, and others who have colluded to engage in bid-rigging and
multiple bribery and kickback schemes related to contracts to deliver
humanitarian aid in Syria," it said in a statement.

In
response, USAID has halted several aid activities in Turkey over
suspicions of fraud and suspended some people and some vendors from
getting U.S. funds, officials said. The
agency refuted media reports that the IRC and another leading charity,
the International Medical Corps, were among those getting USAID funding
withdrawn.

"IRC and IMC have not been suspended," said Sam Ostrander, a spokesman for USAID in Washington, D.C.

ACOSTA: (crosstalk) Maybe we should turn the cameras on, Sean.SPICER: Jen?ACOSTA: Why don’t we…SPICER: Jen?ACOSTA:…turn the cameras on?SPICER: Jen?ACOSTA: Why don’t we turn the cameras on?SPICER: Jen?ACOSTA: Why not turn the cameras on…SPICER: Jen?ACOSTA:…Sean? They’re…SPICER: Jen?ACOSTA:…in the room, the lights (crosstalk) are on.SPICER: Doug?ACOSTA: Why are the cameras off, Sean?SPICER: Trey?ACOSTA: Why are they — why did you…SPICER: Trey?ACOSTA:…turn them off? Can you just…SPICER: Trey?ACOSTA:…give us an answer to that? Can you…SPICER: Trey?ACOSTA:…tell us why you turned the cameras off? Why are they off? It’s a legitimate question.SPICER: Trey?ACOSTA: Can you at least give us an explanation as to why the cameras are off?SPICER: There’s no camera on, Jim....

Fusion
specializes in opposition researchfor Democrats and circulated the
Steele dossier among reporters in an effort to injure the Trump
candidacy and presidency.Mr. Steelesaid he never authorized Fusion to do that.

“The
defendants did not provide any of the pre-election memoranda to media
organizations or journalists. Nor did they authorize anyone to do so,” Mr. Steele
said through his attorney. “Nor did they provide the confidential
December memorandum to media organizations or journalists. Nor did they
authorize anyone to do so.”

“At all material times Fusion was
subject to an obligation not to disclose to third parties confidential
intelligence material provided” by Mr. Steele and his firm Orbis, the court filing reads.Mr. Steelepersonally signed the seven-page filing. He is represented by two
London barristers who specialize in defamation cases: Gavin Millar and
Edward Craven.

Mr.
Cohen calls the dossier “fabricated.” He has shown that he was in
California at the time and has never been to Prague. He told The
Washington Times that he has instructed his attorneys to investigate a
lawsuit against Mr. Steele.

The fact that Mr. Steele acknowledges that he put unverified “raw intelligence” into his
December memo casts further doubt on his research techniques for the
entire 35-page dossier.

The narration of the involvement of Mr. McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and a vocal critic of Mr. Trump, reads like a spy novel.

Andrew
Wood is a former British ambassador to Moscow and is an associate at
the Orbis firm. After the Nov. 8 presidential election, Mr. Wood met
with Mr. McCain and David J. Kramer, a former assistant secretary of state who is
director of human rights and democracy at The McCain Institute for
International Leadership at Arizona State University. By that time, Mr. Steele had written 15 memos for the dossier.

As a result, Mr. Wood arranged for Mr. Kramer to meet with Mr. Steele
“in order to show him the pre-election memoranda on a confidential
basis,” the court filing says. The meeting occurred on Nov. 28 in
Surrey, England."...

Should the 26
June Trump-Modi meeting go well, it would redound to the credit of
President Trump and lead substantially towards the long-cherished
objective of an India-US alliance for security and prosperity that would
in its effects span the globe.

Hence, they [Establishment Republicans appointed by Reince Priebus who want Trump to fail] are seeking to ensure that
the meeting goes badly, by seeking to ensure that President Trump brings
up issues that impinge on the sovereignty and self-respect of India,
aware that Prime Minister Modi is 100% a nationalist, who would react
strongly to any such efforts.

Among the issues they would like
Trump to bring forward for discussion are issues relating to some NGOs
operating in India that have been reported as having indulged in
activities that have the potential to cause mayhem and violence. Other
issues sought to be introduced into the conversation relate to some of
the matters that have been exciting both foreign and domestic media
during the past weeks, including matters of diet. Another googly being
suggested is to bring up the cordial relations that Delhi has with both
Teheran and Moscow, of course for valid geopolitical reasons.

The
expectation of those in the Trump administration who are eager to ensure
friction, and not understanding,during the Modi-Trump summit is that
the introduction of such issues into the Modi-Trump dialogue would
visibly set relations back, thereby slowing down the momentum already
generated by previous heads of government in both Delhi and Washington.

From the very first days of his ascension to office,
Prime Minister Modi showed his goodwill for the US by casting aside
years of hostility manifested in the denial of a US visa to him and
making thus far four successful visits to the US. Those familiar with
President Trump say that he is in sync with Modi on the need for the US
and India to work closely together, and can be expected to ensure that
the Prime Minister’s potentially very consequential visit to Washington
ends up as productive and ground-breaking. On the Indian side, although
there are issues relating to US policy that are of concern, such as
recent changes in visa rules in some categories or climate-related
matters, these are expected to be dealt with at a lower level and mostly
in closed-door sessions, so that the overall atmospheric remain
cordial, an important consideration in a democracy. Prime Minister Modi
is going the extra mile to ensure this, for example, by refusing to
accept the invite by some organisations in cities across the US to
address mass rallies of Indian-Americans during his latest US visit.
Such meetings may give rise to anti-immigrant feelings in a section of
Trump supporters about Indian-Americans, despite this group being the
most law-abiding and high (average) tax-paying of any ethnic community
settled in the US. Hence the expectations on the part of both Modi as
well as Trump loyalists are that there would be a Trump-Modi
breakthrough in US-India relations on 26 June.

This would ensure that
the two democracies move largely onto the same page in confronting
threats and taking advantage of opportunities in the Indo-Pacific
century....

"Both during the 2016 Presidential campaign trailand in his
previous avatar as a billionaire businessperson, President Donald John
Trump had integrated India as a core component of the global order in
his policies and actions. However, since his inauguration on 20 January
and subsequently, very little mention has been made of India in the
statements made by spokespersons for the Trump administration, while, as
yet, several posts relevant to relations with India (such as that of
Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia) remain unfilled.

It was known within the Washington
Beltway—the US equivalent of India’s Lutyens Zone—that (former)
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton held the view that the benefits of a
close alliance with India were “oversold” by Condoleezza Rice and others
in the Bush team, and that far greater emphasis needed to be paid on
ensuring improved relations with China, her rhetoric to the contrary.... While President Obama and Prime Minister Manmohan
Singh saw the advantages...of much closer India-US ties, the
former was slowed down by the Clintonites in his administration and the
latter by the leadership of the Congress Party, which went largely by
the views of Antony in such matters, despite the close personal
friendship between Sonia Gandhi and Hillary Clinton.

Emitted by natural and human sources, aerosols can directly influence
climate by reflecting or absorbing the sun's radiation. The small
particles also affect climate indirectly by seeding clouds and changing
cloud properties, such as reflectivity.

A new study, led by climate scientist Drew Shindell of the NASA Goddard
Institute for Space Studies, New York, used a coupled ocean-atmosphere
model to investigate how sensitive different regional climates are to
changes in levels of carbon dioxide, ozone, and aerosols.

The regions of Earth that showed the strongest responses to aerosols in
the model are the same regions that have witnessed the greatest
real-world temperature increases since 1976. The Arctic region has seen
its surface air temperatures increase by 1.5 C (2.7 F) since the
mid-1970s.In the Antarctic, where aerosols play less of a role, the
surface air temperature has increased about 0.35 C (0.6 F).

That makes sense, Shindell explained, because of the Arctic's proximity
to North America and Europe. The two highly industrialized regions have
produced most of the world's aerosol emissions over the last century,
and some of those aerosols drift northward and collect in the Arctic.
Precipitation, which normally flushes aerosols out of the atmosphere, is
minimal there, so the particles remain in the air longer and have a
stronger impact than in other parts of the world.

Aerosols tend to be quite-short lived, residing in the atmosphere for
just a few days or weeks. Greenhouses gases, by contrast, can persist
for hundreds of years. Atmospheric chemists theorize that the climate
system may be more responsive to changes in aerosol levels over the next
few decades than to changes in greenhouse gas levels, which will have
the more powerful effect in coming centuries."...

While the hopes of some developing nations for vast commitments of new foreign assistancedid not materialize, what was extraordinary to me was
how many expectations were met--and how much the world did achieve....